The Colorblindness Fetish
with John McWhorter
We too often give too much weight to racial identity. We let it determine too much about us and too much about how we view others. John and I both hope for a future in which we all wear our race more “lightly,” in which it’s freighted with far less social meaning than it currently carries. But how lightly is too lightly? In this clip from our most recent subscriber-only Q&A session, I ask whether those who want a truly colorblind society risk indiscriminately discarding a precious cultural inheritance.
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There is a lot to unpack in Glenn's use of "narrating my life through a racial lens." I feel like there is a disconnect between what people like Coleman Hughes mean when they "fetishize" colorblindness and what Glenn (and to a much lesser extent John) experience when they consider colorblindness in its eventual realization. To put what I am trying to say into (hopefully) clearer focus, let us consider one of the most-quoted phrases in Dr. King's admonition. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
In my analysis, that statement has nothing--not a damned thing--to do with colorblindness or not narrating one's life through a racial lens, or any of that. Life fried chicken? Eat up! Prefer sushi? Raw is best, in my view. Enjoy old videos of James Brown dancing? Me too. Feel "some kind of way" about the history of slavery and what it means to your current life? That makes two of us. So. Effing. What?
What we want, and what I would think would be inarguable, is this. One, judge people one-at-a-time. (Sure, a book cover tells you something about the book, but only a fool decides about every book by every cover.) Two, expect the best of people, i.e., meritocracy, regardless of their cultural heritage. Want this job as a nuclear physicist? Your ass better be able to do math. And so on...
My post has gone on much too long but let me end with this. "Post-racial" does not mean "no races exist" or whatever. It means that what I expect and receive from a person is not always, or even mostly, something I can AUTOMATICALLY deduce from their race. In contrast, when I see a woman, I know. (And I like that.) Similarly, when I see a man, I know. I like that too. When I see a "white man" what should I expect, outside that which is pertinent to being a man? Who the hell knows? Same for everyone else. And that's okay. (Yes, I know we currently live in a time when gender fluidity is all the rage. That makes NOT jumping to a conclusion more important, not less, does it not?)
While I am somewhat hesitant to share my own writing, I have thought about this issue quite a bit, dating back to when I wrote for an online libertarian website. Here is one such piece, dating back to 2007: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/04/wilton-alston/tell-me-again/. It covers my feelings on this issue and saves me the time of repeating, or attempting to repeat, them here. Hopefully, it is helpful.
This is, obviously, a fascinating and multi-layered subject. Thanks for continuing to enrich the conversation, guys!
I work in the tech sector. It is my impression that the largest fraction of the workforce is foreign born, and the next largest fraction is native born with at least one foreign born parent. The second generation has a lot of intermarriage and it looks like the third will have more. There are a lot of complaints within the field of a wide variety of discrimination by foreign born managers - and this is totally independent of the American white-black issue. A lot of the sourth Indians are darker than many African Americans, so I have a real problem with the term white-black, which has been superceeded by the change in ethnic sources of the population subgroups. So in the end I have to side with the colorblindness side. It isn't a simple white - black issue - and I would note that the African population subgroups are widely variable as well.